CVE-2026-6791

Potential stack-based buffer clash during tilde expansion in wordexp

MEDIUM
6.6
CVSS Score
Published: August 10, 2026 at 06:41 PM UTC
Updated: October 24, 2026 at 04:10 PM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorGlibc

Using glibc by The GNU C Library?

Get instant alerts when new vulnerabilities affect glibc - before attackers find them.

Real-time alertsTrack your software stackFree plan available
Severity
MEDIUM6.6
Exploit prediction
EPSS 0.2%
SSVC
No known exploit

Description

When expanding paths that begin with a tilde (~) followed by a username, the internal parse_tilde function extracts the username to determine the user's home directory. The implementation allocates memory for this username directly on the stack using the strndupa macro. Because the size of this allocation was determined by the length of the user-supplied input without any bounds checks, passing an excessively long username e.g. thousands of characters, forces the thread to exhaust its stack space. Thus if an application passes untrusted, attacker-controlled input to the wordexp function, an attacker can trigger a stack clash.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

2.0 ≤ v ≤ 2.432.0

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet, and no fixed version or vendor advisory is recorded against it.

References (1)

SSVC — Action Prioritization

SSVCNo known exploitNot automatablePartial impact

SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.

CVSS

6.6MEDIUMglibc
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusAWAITING ANALYSIS
CWE
CWE-121

Get alerted

Stop reading CVE feeds looking for your own stack

Track the products you run and VulnTracker tells you when a new CVE affects them — with what is known about fixing it, and nothing about the rest.

Free plan, no card